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Grant Taylor

In particular, you can specify a filter to be used instead of the default postscript filter chain, and configure the queue to print to /dev/null. It will work the same way. The tricky bit is that CUPS defines queue attributes based on a PPD file, which is all well and good for your basic Postscript printer, but gets a little funky for non-ps printers. For "random" filtering, the key bit is the *cupsFilter: attribute, in which you may specify a filter to be run.

This is, incidentally, how Foomatic plugs itself into CUPS; foomatic is in LPD terms a monster general-purpose if= filter that serves mainly to bodge the drivers into the right place.

- Grant Taylor

By and large, any combination of n spam techniques, where n is at least three or so, will work about as well. Depending on the flavor of your legitimate mail you'll get somewhere between 95 to 99.9% accuracy. You will get both false positives and negatives.

Clearly the only schemes which can improve on this are the human-driven shared blacklist affairs. There seem to be several of these around, and they, too, currently produce imperfect results. It's unclear when or if any of these will reach a large enough critical mass to produce many nines of accuracy.

Grant Taylor <gtaylor+slashdot_bffjg091702@picante.com>
http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/spam/

Todd

"There are several cellular services sold in North America. It's not possible to say that any one is best for everyone; there is much competition between the companies so most offerings are at least competetive."

"This web page has facts about the different services available. Since I live in Boston, I've included some details specific to Boston, but 95% of the information here applies to anyone in the US or Canada. There is a Boston page with info on Boston cellular companies with descriptions of each service, and some assorted notes on how cellular service works and how to decide what to buy. Finally, there is a database containing details about service plans and phones with an interface to let you match them up."

The problem is the fact that there is NO unified printing subsystem available to an application developer under Linux or any other UNIX/X11 system for that matter.

There are a few to chose from, but the most promising is probably gnome-print, which will eventually include such (mis) features as font-matching, and for now is a nice little postscript generating library.

This not only requires a GOOD postscript RIP, but also a good printer driver for that RIP. Introducing a generic RIP application into the middle of things just totally destroys any hope of getting optimized printer output for your new fangled, high powered, 6-color inkjet.

Ghostscript is an excellent RIP, and there are now highly optimized drivers for several newfangled, high powered, 6-color inkjets; they were derived from the Gimp's Epson drivers by Robert Krawitz.

This thing HP and VA are doing is not a *real* solution to the *real* problem.

Quite.

Grant Taylor
Linux Printing HOWTO

Technology should be command line or CLI interfaced, integrated with both desktop environments, cope equally well with the damnds of network and local printing, provide a system for open-sourced or binary only drivers, and have intelligent downloading and execution of drivers [unlike the NT model]. It also must be simple to develop for, compatible with a variety of existing standards [postscript, unix, lpr, etc].

You don't even mention PDQ, which gives you many of the attributes you ask for: it has command-line and GTK interfaces, has a unified method to define drivers (vs the smattering of scripts and kludges from lpr), is compatible with lpd, windows, novell, and apple network printing, and provides a mechanism for any kind of driver imaginable, replete with basic sanity-checking to see that all the parts are installed.

Grant Tayor
Linux Printing HOWTO

Technology should be command line or CLI interfaced, integrated with both desktop environments, cope equally well with the damnds of network and local printing, provide a system for open-sourced or binary only drivers, and have intelligent downloading and execution of drivers [unlike the NT model]. It also must be simple to develop for, compatible with a variety of existing standards [postscript, unix, lpr, etc].

You don't even mention PDQ, which gives you many of the attributes you ask for: it has command-line and GTK interfaces, has a unified method to define drivers (vs the smattering of scripts and kludges from lpr), is compatible with lpd, windows, novell, and apple network printing, and provides a mechanism for any kind of driver imaginable, replete with basic sanity-checking to see that all the parts are installed.

Grant Tayor
Linux Printing HOWTO

Robert Krawitz has been extending my print plug-in to support the Photo printers and the 1440x720 DPI modes in GIMP (available in the 1.1.x development versions.)

Indeed. Furthermore, Robert's Epson driver (which now does 6-color on several Photo Styluses) has been adapted into Ghostscript, where it produces much the same quality output.

Grant Taylor
Linux Printing HOWTO

How can I use Economode with my 1100 then?

If you really wish to be a good netizen, whip up a nice PDQ description with all the useful settings for your printer, and submit it to me for inclusion in the database.

- Grant Taylor
Linux Printing HOWTO

How can I use Economode with my 1100 then?

If you really wish to be a good netizen, whip up a nice PDQ description with all the useful settings for your printer, and submit it to me for inclusion in the database.

- Grant Taylor
Linux Printing HOWTO

How can I use Economode with my 1100 then?

If you really wish to be a good netizen, whip up a nice PDQ description with all the useful settings for your printer, and submit it to me for inclusion in the database.

- Grant Taylor
Linux Printing HOWTO

No, it doesn't. Windows provides an API derived from its graphics functions to allow applications to print. This is not obviously better than always using Postscript, which is standardized and very stable; various libraries are available to help generate good Postscript.

The Windows printing back-end, the drivers, renderers, etc are often junk. The only advantage to the Windows way is that most printers come with Windows drivers. Those drivers are often huge, unreliable, buggy monsters which break between Windows revisions and don't work on other OS flavors at all. Many vendors are known not to release updated drivers for old printers as new versions of Windows arrive.

Linux printer drivers generally work on DOS, OS/2, Windows, every Unix in town, and elsewhere. Ghostscript is in fact shipped as firmware in many printers; there's a lot to said for gs (and a list of problems, too: difficult compilation, a funky license, etc).

The main problem facing Linux is a modest shortage of drivers for some low-end printers, and awful support by distributions: Red Hat still doesn't support any non-vanilla-Ghostscript/Postscript/ascii printers like the Lexmarks (most of which mostly work) or HP's "PPA" printers.

- Grant Taylor
(Slashdot is awkward and klunky. Demand NNTP!)

In the latest Printing HOWTO, I have begun to advocate the use of PDQ instead of the lpr command as the primary user interface to printers. This lets users select print quality, duplex mode, paper types, etc, and lets both users and superusers define printers.

I'm struggling to connect all the people working on printing software. There are CUPS, gnome-print, PUP, PDQ, PPR, LPRng, apsfilter, magicfilter, printtool, printool's impending rewrite, rhs-printfilters, gimp's print plugin, something in KDE, and now this "Corel Printin API". The flurry of development is good, but people are developing in all directions, and at least in Corel's case I'm sure that they've just hacked up something like the Windows model so they can get their software out the door.

- Grant Taylor
(Slashdot is awkward and klunky. Demand NNTP!)

I looked at these with the idea of setting one up by my pool so as to have music, but the cost for non-mass-market stuff like this tends to be prohibitive. It's also not clear that you can get a PC/104 format wireless ethernet board.

Grant Taylor

Personally I have a Canon 4300 which is reasonable (for the price). More recently a friend bought an Epson 460 which is pretty nice. But I would recommend a visit to the Unix printer compatability db before any purchase;

http://gatekeeper.picant e.com/~gtaylor/pht/printer_list.cg

grek

I use a Sierra Wireless Aircard in my Mitsubishi Amity laptop. It speaks CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data) to my provider which gives me an IP address directly routed to the Internet for a flat monthly fee from Bell Atlantic Mobile.

To get it to run under Linux, I acquired a diff to the PCMCIA sources to add support for the card. Patch, make, make install and then some additional futzing with minicom and the Aircard reference manual to learn how to load my IP address into the card.

I can now read and send email and surf the web from the Long Island Rail Road for $25/month.

Here's a link to more information on Linux and CDPD.

I'm not always around my desktop, but I if I had a handheld running a free Unix, I could do 80% of my work on that, mostly coding.

Why are handhelds running Win9x so much more in demand than WinCE? Because people want to be able to integrate data with their desktop PC, and if you are running the same OS, this is painless.

Well, my desktop OS is Linux, so I want a Linux handheld for the same reasons. Heck, I don't even need to run XFree86, but it's really comforting to know that some daring Libretto owners have managed to do it.